Metals & Markets Glossary

The "K" (karat) tells you how much of a piece is pure gold, out of 24 parts. 24K is 99.9% pure and too soft for everyday jewellery, so 22K (91.6% gold, BIS-hallmarked) is the Indian retail standard, 18K (75%) is common for diamond-studded pieces, and 14K (58.3%) is more durable but less pure. All four are priced directly off the 24K rate on our Jewellery Calculator — 22K = 24K rate × 22/24, and so on.

A BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards) hallmark is a government-certified stamp confirming a gold item's actual purity matches what the jeweller claims — it's the legal proof, not just a marketing label. Since June 2021, hallmarking is mandatory for gold jewellery sold in India above a certain purity threshold, and since April 2023 every piece must carry a 6-digit alphanumeric HUID (Hallmark Unique Identification) that you can verify against the retailer's invoice on the BIS CARE app.

The labour/craftsmanship fee a jeweller adds on top of the raw metal cost — typically 8–15% of the metal value for plain gold jewellery (machine-made chains can run as low as 3–6%, intricate hand-finished pieces 20%+), charged either as a percentage or a flat per-gram rate (commonly ₹200–₹800/gram in Indian retail). Unlike the metal price itself, making charges are set by each jeweller individually and are often negotiable. Our Jewellery Calculator lets you toggle between both billing methods.

India charges 3% GST on the combined value of gold/silver metal cost plus making charges — this is specific to precious-metal jewellery, not the general GST rate applied to other goods. Worked example: 10g of 22K gold at ₹7,000/gram = ₹70,000, plus 10% making charges (₹7,000) = ₹77,000 taxable value, plus 3% GST (₹2,310) = ₹79,310 final bill. It only applies within India; our calculators automatically hide it for every other country.

"999" fine silver is 99.9% pure — the reference rate we quote for silver. "925" sterling silver is 92.5% pure, alloyed with other metals (usually copper) for extra strength, and is the standard for silver jewellery and cutlery. "800" silver is a lower-purity grade used in some older or regional pieces.

Two different units that sound identical: karat (with a K) measures gold purity out of 24 parts, while carat (with a C) measures the physical weight of a gemstone (1 carat = 0.2 grams). A "2-carat, 18-karat" ring describes the diamond's weight and the gold's purity separately.

A traditional South Asian unit equal to 11.664 grams, still widely used for quoting gold and silver prices across India, Nepal and Pakistan, especially in wholesale bullion markets. Every price page on this site includes a "1 Tola" conversion alongside the gram rate.

The standard international unit for precious metals — equal to 31.1035 grams, about 10% heavier than a regular ("avoirdupois") ounce (28.35g). Global benchmarks like the LBMA Gold Price and COMEX futures are quoted per troy ounce (e.g. "gold at $2,650/oz" in financial news); we convert this to per-gram INR for every metal we track, so you never have to do the 31.1035 division yourself.

In Indian gold retail, a "sovereign" (or "pavan") commonly refers to an 8-gram unit of gold, distinct from the historical British gold sovereign coin. It's a popular purchase size in South India and is offered as a weight option on our Jewellery Calculator.

Gold, silver, platinum and uranium are quoted per gram because they trade in small, high-value quantities. Industrial metals like copper, aluminium, zinc and lead are quoted per kilogram because they're bought and priced in bulk — showing copper "per gram" would just make the number look artificially tiny. Every price on this site is stored per gram internally and only converted to per-kg for display.

India's dominant commodity futures exchange, headquartered in Mumbai — the domestic reference point for gold, silver and several industrial metals traded within India. Trading runs roughly 9:00am–11:30/11:55pm IST on non-holiday weekdays, with gold and silver contracts quoted in INR per 10g and per kg respectively. See the full MCX market profile.

The primary US exchange (part of CME Group) for gold, silver and copper futures, trading in near-continuous sessions (Sunday–Friday, with a daily settlement window). COMEX settlement prices are one of the most-watched global reference points for precious metals and are quoted in USD per troy ounce (per pound for copper). See the full COMEX market profile.

A twice-daily benchmark price set in London by the LBMA (London Bullion Market Association) via an electronic auction — one at 10:30am and one at 3:00pm London time — the reference most of the world's gold trade, from central banks to jewellers, is priced against. See the full LBMA market profile.

The world's primary market for industrial/base metals — aluminium, copper, zinc, lead, nickel and tin — where prices are still partly set via open-outcry trading on a physical trading floor ("The Ring") alongside electronic trading, and contracts settle against specific forward "prompt dates" rather than a single spot date. See the full LME market profile.

On our country and continent pages, "Reference Market" is an informational link to the nearest tracked exchange for that country — it is not a claim that we source prices directly from it. All prices on this site come from one live data feed (metalpriceapi.com), converted into each country's currency; the reference market is context for understanding how that country's traders typically watch the metal market.

The spot price is the current price for immediate delivery — what every price on this site reflects. A futures price is an agreed price for delivery at a set date in the future (traded on exchanges like MCX/COMEX), which can differ from spot based on interest rates, storage costs and market expectations.

The percentage difference between today's price and the previous day's price for the same metal/city/country. A positive % (shown in green with ▲) means the price rose; negative (red, ▼) means it fell. This is the single number most of our cards, tables and alerts are built around.

A bull market describes a sustained period of rising prices and investor optimism; a bear market describes a sustained decline, commonly defined as a 20%+ drop from a recent peak. These terms describe a trend over weeks or months, not a single day's move — check our Gold Price page's 10-day/1-year charts to see actual multi-week trends rather than reading one day's change as a "market".

Precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium) are valued for rarity and low reactivity. Base metals (copper, aluminium, zinc, lead, tin, nickel, iron) are industrial workhorses, priced in bulk. Rare earth / minor metals (neodymium, gallium, indium, tellurium) are used in small quantities in electronics and green-energy technology, and trade on much thinner, less liquid markets.

An Exchange-Traded Fund that holds physical gold (or gold-backed assets) and trades on a stock exchange like a share (e.g. Nippon India ETF Gold BeES, HDFC Gold ETF) — a way to gain price exposure to gold without storing physical metal, buyable in units worth roughly 1/100th gram of gold each. Returns broadly track the spot gold price shown on this site, minus a small annual fund expense ratio (typically 0.4–0.8%).

A government-issued bond denominated in grams of gold, previously sold by the Reserve Bank of India on behalf of the Government of India in periodic tranches. The government discontinued new SGB issuance after the 2023–24 Series IV tranche in February 2024 (confirmed by the Finance Ministry in 2025), citing the scheme's high borrowing cost relative to plain government securities. Existing SGBs remain tradeable on the NSE/BSE and can still be held to their 8-year maturity (with early exit allowed from year 5) to collect the fixed 2.5% annual interest and the no-capital-gains-tax benefit if held to term — but as of 2026, it is no longer possible to buy a fresh SGB tranche from the government.

See "Why Some Metals Show /g and Others /kg" above — the short version: precious/high-value metals display per gram, bulk industrial metals display per kilogram, and the underlying database always stores the per-gram INR value regardless of display unit.

A card shown on every metal, country and energy page: the range bar plots today's price between the lowest and highest close of the last 7 real trading days, and momentum is the percentage change from the oldest of those 7 days to today. It's a short-term trend readout, not a forecast — see any metal profile for a live example.

A momentum indicator, scored 0–100, that measures how fast and how far a price has moved recently. Above 70 is generally read as "overbought" (the rally may be overextended), below 30 as "oversold" (the decline may be overextended) — it's a read on recent momentum, not a buy/sell signal on its own. Shown in the Technical Analysis section of our News articles, computed from this site's own real price history.

A trend-momentum indicator built from two moving averages of price: the "MACD line" (the gap between a shorter and a longer moving average) and a "signal line" (a moving average of the MACD line itself). When the MACD line crosses above its signal line that's typically read as strengthening upward momentum, and below as strengthening downward momentum. The gap between the two is the "histogram."

The average price over a fixed recent window (e.g. the last 20 or 50 days), used to smooth out day-to-day noise and show the underlying trend. A simple moving average (SMA) weights every day in the window equally; an exponential moving average (EMA) weights recent days more heavily, so it reacts faster to new price moves.

Support is a price level a metal has recently struggled to fall below — buying pressure has tended to show up there. Resistance is a level it has recently struggled to rise above — selling pressure has tended to show up there. Both are read from actual recent price history, not predicted; a price breaking through either level is often treated as a meaningful shift in the trend.

How much a price swings up and down over a given period, regardless of direction. Higher volatility means bigger, faster price moves (and bigger risk either way); lower volatility means calmer, more gradual moves. Commonly summarized as an annualized percentage derived from the size of recent day-to-day price changes.

On a futures exchange (like MCX or COMEX), the total number of outstanding contracts that haven't yet been closed out or settled — a measure of how much money is actively committed to a market, distinct from trading volume (how many contracts changed hands in a day). MetalsCost.com tracks spot reference prices, not exchange futures positions, so open interest is not a figure we publish.

The highest and lowest price a metal has traded at over the trailing 12 months — a quick reference point for how today's price compares to its recent range, distinct from the all-time high/low over the metal's entire tracked history.

A metal recovered as a secondary output of mining or refining a different, primary metal — not from its own dedicated mine. Several metals on this site are byproducts: indium and gallium come from zinc/aluminium refining, tellurium comes from copper refining, and rhodium comes from platinum/palladium mining. Supply of a byproduct metal often tracks the primary metal's mining volume more than its own price.

A family of six chemically similar, rare metals typically mined together — platinum, palladium and rhodium are the three tracked on this site, alongside ruthenium, iridium and osmium (not tracked). South Africa and Russia together supply the large majority of the world's mined PGMs, which is why LPPM prices are unusually sensitive to news from those two countries specifically.

Platinum, palladium and rhodium each play a role in a vehicle's catalytic converter, which breaks down exhaust pollutants before they leave the tailpipe — platinum and rhodium lead in diesel engines, palladium in petrol engines. This automotive demand, not jewellery, is what actually drives these three metals' prices day to day.

The two competing ways lithium is actually mined. Spodumene is a hard-rock ore, crushed and processed — Australia's dominant method. Brine extraction pumps lithium-rich salt-flat water and evaporates it over months — the method used across South America's "Lithium Triangle" (Argentina, Chile, Bolivia). Same element, genuinely different industries and cost structures.

One of 17 chemically similar elements — neodymium (tracked on this site) among them — that aren't actually rare in the ground, but are rarely found in concentrations worth mining and are notoriously difficult to separate from each other and from radioactive byproducts. China dominates global rare-earth refining capacity, not just mining, which is the real chokepoint in the supply chain.

A neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnet — the strongest type commercially available, and the reason neodymium demand exists at all. NdFeB magnets are what let EV motors, wind-turbine generators, hard drives and headphone speakers be as compact and powerful as they are for their size.

A transparent, electrically conductive coating made primarily from indium, used on nearly every touchscreen and LCD/OLED display in the world. There's no widely-deployed substitute that matches ITO's combination of transparency and conductivity, which keeps indium demand tightly linked to global display-panel manufacturing.

A thin-film solar panel technology that uses tellurium as a core ingredient, offering a cost-competitive alternative to conventional silicon panels — commercialised at scale by manufacturers like First Solar. It's the main reason tellurium, otherwise an obscure byproduct of copper refining, has real industrial demand.

Smelting uses heat and a chemical reducing agent to extract raw metal from ore (e.g. iron ore into pig iron, or copper concentrate into blister copper). Refining is the further purification step after smelting — removing remaining impurities to reach the purity level (like 99.9% "fine" gold or silver) that markets actually trade.

A firm that doesn't run a trading venue at all — it surveys real transactions and firm bids/offers from producers, traders and consumers, then publishes an assessed price. Fastmarkets (lithium, cobalt, molybdenum, rhodium), Asian Metal (gallium, indium, neodymium, tellurium) and UxC/TradeTech (uranium) all work this way — used for metals traded in volumes too thin, or under contract terms too irregular, for a listed futures contract to work well.

China's main futures exchange for base metals — aluminium, copper, zinc, lead, nickel and tin — quoted in yuan and physically deliverable against warehouses inside China. The "Shanghai-London arbitrage" (the SHFE-LME price gap) is a closely watched live signal of Chinese industrial demand. See the full SHFE market profile.

China's physical, spot gold market — unlike COMEX or SHFE-style futures, every SGE contract is backed by real gold sitting in SGE-certified vaults. Launched in 2002 after decades of restricted private gold ownership in China, it's since become the largest physical gold market on Earth by volume. See the full SGE market profile.

The world's largest venue for iron ore derivatives — cash-settled against independent index providers (Platts/S&P Global, Fastmarkets MB, TSI) rather than setting a physical price itself. Singapore hosts it precisely because it's neutral ground: neither a major iron ore producer nor the dominant buyer. See the full SGX market profile.

The LBMA's sister market for platinum and palladium — same London auction mechanism, twice-daily pricing, but covering two metals whose demand is dominated by catalytic converters rather than jewellery. See the full LPPM market profile.

The LBMA's global registry of accredited gold and silver refiners whose bars are trusted and accepted without re-assay by vaults everywhere. A bar from a Good Delivery refiner can move between London, Zurich and Singapore without ever being melted down and re-tested — a big part of why London stayed the world's physical bullion hub.

The single daily reference price an exchange fixes for invoicing physical metal against — on the LME, this is still set inside the open-outcry "Ring" trading session, not purely from screen trading, despite most LME volume today being electronic.

A per-metal profile scored across up to five real dimensions: price momentum, price volatility, geographic concentration, supply security and demand mix. The first four are recalculated directly from this site's own stored price and reserve data; demand mix is manually researched and cited once per metal, then revisited periodically. A dimension shows as "not yet scored" rather than a guessed number when we don't have a real basis for it yet — see the full Metal DNA profiles.

This site's mine-to-market view of a metal's real supply chain — extraction, processing and the industries that depend on it — built from sourced concentration data, not a generic diagram. See the full Metal Chain section.

The demand-side counterpart to Metal Chain: which industries and products actually consume a given metal, with sourced demand-share figures rather than a vague "used in electronics" description. See the full Metal Applications section.

Country-by-country reported mineral reserves and production figures, sourced from the U.S. Geological Survey's Mineral Commodity Summaries — the same publicly-published dataset governments and mining analysts use, not an internal estimate. See the full Global Metal Reserves section.

A calendar of metal and mineral observances, each one clearly labeled Official (a recognised body-designated day), Industry (an established trade-body observance) or MetalsCost Editorial (a date we've assigned ourselves where no official one exists) — so you always know which kind of date you're looking at. See the full Metal Days calendar.

Tap the star icon on any metal card to add it to your personal watchlist, shown at the top of the homepage for quick access. It's stored in your own browser (not a site account), so it's specific to the device and browser you added it from.

Two separate notification systems on this site. The bell icon in the header opts you into a daily digest push notification — a fixed gold-and-silver summary sent once each morning. A custom price alert (available from a metal's own price page) is different: you set your own metal and target price, and it notifies you only when that specific level is actually crossed.

Every price page footnotes which kind of figure it's showing. Prices from 2025-04-05 onward are real daily figures pulled from our live data feed. Anything before that date is a reconstructed historical estimate (one figure per year back to 1926, one per month from 2015 onward), sourced from RBI records, World Gold Council and IBJA archives, or international spot price converted at the day's exchange rate — clearly marked as an estimate, never presented as a precise daily quote. See any price history page for both kinds side by side.

The homepage table that blends India's own city-level prices with our tracked international rates for roughly 19 other countries into a single, continent-grouped view — useful for comparing a metal's price across regions in one place rather than checking each country page separately.

Brent (North Sea) prices roughly two-thirds of the world's internationally traded crude oil — the reference most Asian and European refiners actually pay. WTI (West Texas Intermediate, delivered at Cushing, Oklahoma) is the US domestic benchmark, and typically trades a few dollars below Brent due to quality and shipping-logistics differences, not a fundamentally different oil market. See Brent and WTI live prices.

The standard unit crude oil is traded in — 42 US gallons (about 159 litres). Both Brent and WTI on this site are priced in INR per barrel, converted daily from live international benchmarks.

Reformulated Blendstock for Oxygenate Blending — the standard US gasoline futures contract traded on NYMEX, priced in INR per US gallon on this site. This is the wholesale fuel benchmark refiners and traders use, not the retail petrol price at an Indian pump, which adds central excise duty, state VAT and dealer commission on top — together typically more than half the pump price. See the live gasoline price.

Million British Thermal Units — the standard unit natural gas is traded in. A BTU is the energy needed to raise one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit; natural gas is priced per MMBtu because, unlike oil, it's a gas and can't be usefully measured by volume alone across different pressures and temperatures.

A natural gas pipeline interchange in Louisiana, USA, that gives its name to the standard NYMEX natural gas futures contract — the world's most widely referenced natural gas benchmark, tracked on this site's natural gas price page. It is not the price of an LPG cooking cylinder, which is a different product (propane/butane) under a separate retail system in India.